[HN Gopher] Show HN: Telescope - an open-source web-based log vi...
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Show HN: Telescope - an open-source web-based log viewer for logs
in ClickHouse
Hey everyone! I'm working on Telescope - an open-source web-based
log viewer designed to make working with logs stored in ClickHouse
easier and more intuitive. I wasn't happy with existing log
viewers - most of them force a specific log format, are tied to
ingestion pipelines, or are just a small part of a larger platform.
Others didn't display logs the way I wanted. So I decided to build
my own lightweight, flexible log viewer - one that actually fits my
needs. Check it out: Video demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IItMOXwugY GitHub:
https://github.com/iamtelescope/telescope Live demo:
https://telescope.humanuser.net Discord:
https://discord.gg/rXpjDnEc
Author : r0b3r4
Score : 149 points
Date : 2025-02-26 08:28 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| csh602 wrote:
| Looks simple and clean! Big ups for starts of good screenshots,
| docs, and quickstart (Docker) instructions.
|
| Regarding the name, "Telescope" is also the name of a Neovim
| fuzzy finder[0] that dominates the ecosystem there. Other results
| appear by searching "telescope github".
|
| [0]: https://github.com/nvim-telescope/telescope.nvim
| r0b3r4 wrote:
| Well, every single name I came up with was already taken and
| present in GitHub. So...
| Purplish9893 wrote:
| Clearly we need an extension to search this new service with
| telescope.nvim. telescope-telescope.nvim.
| nucleardog wrote:
| Also, a bit more directly related, a log viewer / monitoring
| solution from Laravel: https://laravel.com/docs/12.x/telescope
| throwaw12 wrote:
| This one seems to be optimized for log viewing at the moment, are
| there any DataDog alternatives built on top of Clickhouse, which
| supports full range of OpenTelemetry features?
| Cnidarias wrote:
| There are these guys which are based on OTEL:
| https://github.com/hyperdxio/hyperdx
| pratio wrote:
| +1 for hyperdx, I'm testing it and love it.
| mikeshi42 wrote:
| author here, just wanted to chime in that I really
| appreciate the kind words about what we've been building :)
| puppion wrote:
| There is lumigo, also based on Clickhouse https://lumigo.io/
| perteraul wrote:
| I think https://multiplayer.app would also fit your
| description.
| idkyall wrote:
| Check out signoz: https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz
|
| OSS o11y platform built on clickhouse & otel.
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Looks cool I might try it out!
|
| I need a central place, something simple where I can actually
| read the contents of the logs that are generated by the dozen of
| services that I run for clients, etc... instead of stupidly
| SSH'ing to every server.
|
| Does this fit the use case?
|
| I tried Loki once but it was painful to set up and more geared
| toward aggregating events and stats.
| iwanhae wrote:
| I'm curious to know what makes the Loki installation process so
| painful.
|
| I'm interested in learning more about the software installation
| experience.
| samsk wrote:
| Only problematic thing might be relatively frequent storage
| changes (like they like to deprecate primary storage driver),
| otherwise its IMHO easy to setup. I'm running it on several
| projects, because it doesn't needs beefy machine like Elastic
| or even ClickHouse.
| perteraul wrote:
| genuinely wondering if https://multiplayer.app would work for
| you.
|
| note: I'm part of the Multiplayer team.
| r0b3r4 wrote:
| Thanks! Telescope is more focused on displaying logs and
| providing access to them rather than handling log ingestion. In
| the future, I plan to support various sources like Docker, k8s,
| and files to improve the local development workflow. However,
| it's unlikely that Telescope will support fetching logs from
| remote servers via SSH, as that's not its primary use case.
| homebrewer wrote:
| Graylog is a pretty standard solution to your problems (I
| believe), although they've been closing down their licensing
| more and more as time goes on.
| piterrro wrote:
| I'm author of Logdy: https://logdy.dev/
| https://github.com/logdyhq/logdy-core It comes as a precompiled
| binary you can download/deploy on the server and use to browse
| larger log files. I suggest you take a look!
| walth wrote:
| I'd recommend VictoriaLogs and shipping to via Vector
| xorcist wrote:
| If all you want is the plaintext logs, there's no need to
| bother with special products. Just point syslog in the right
| direction as if it was 1995. Everything can log to syslog
| already. Things like Splunk, Graylog and Kibana are mostly for
| visualization and query interfaces.
| vortegne wrote:
| Unfortunate name choice, as @csh602 mentioned
|
| Viewer looks pretty good though. Reminds me of DataDog UI, but
| not as slow. Will play around more, thanks!
| r0b3r4 wrote:
| As we all know, naming is an unsolvable problem in IT :)
|
| Regarding performance - 95% of Telescope's speed depends on how
| fast your ClickHouse responds. If you have a well-optimized
| schema and use the right indexes, Telescope's overhead will be
| minimal.
| VectorLock wrote:
| Look out, Kibana, they're gunning for you!
| darkstar_16 wrote:
| I like how this is mostly based on the Kibana UI. Makes easier to
| convince other people to move to it.
| r0b3r4 wrote:
| To be honest, I was more inspired by DataDog :)
| danmur wrote:
| I've used graylog the most so that's what it looks like to me
| :P. I like how you can do a bunch of extraction stuff right
| there in the query interface though, that's awesome. It seems
| like a very thoughtful UI.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Honestly that pushes me away from it. I find kibana to be a
| very frustrating experience.
| mikeshi42 wrote:
| (not op) curious what you find frustrating about it?
| akdor1154 wrote:
| Cool! I'm currently playing with the Grafana Clickhouse connector
| to do broadly similar - are these compatible? Can Telescope read
| an OTEL logs table in Clickhouse?
| r0b3r4 wrote:
| Yes, this is exactly where Telescope can be useful (and
| actually, the way Grafana displays logs was my motivation for
| writing my own viewer)
|
| Telescope can work with any table in ClickHouse. Of course, not
| every single ClickHouse type has been tested, but there
| shouldn't be any issues with the most common ones
|
| If you want, you can check how it works with the OTEL schema in
| the live demo here:
| https://telescope.humanuser.net/sources/otel-demo/explore
| piterrro wrote:
| There's also Logdy (https://github.com/logdyhq/logdy-core) that
| can work with raw files and comes with a UI as well in a single
| precompiled binary so no need for installs and setups. If you're
| looking for a simple solution for browsing log files with a web
| UI, this might be it! (I'm the author)
| corytheboyd wrote:
| Heyo I've noticed Lodgy come up a few times on HN now, and was
| curious if you explored making it a proper desktop application
| instead of a two-part UI and CLI application. Did you rule that
| out for some reason?
| Dowwie wrote:
| It can display logs in-context. Awesome!
| new_user_final wrote:
| Rollbar has a feature to upload JavaScript sourcemaps files. When
| I am viewing logs from minified js files, it automatically apply
| sourcemaps and correctly shows line number.
|
| Is there any open source tool that does the same?
| nh2 wrote:
| It would be great if the logs could describe a bit what exactly
| one has to do to use this as an alternative to Grafana Loki.
|
| How do I get my logs (e.g. local text files from disk like nginx
| logs, or files that need transformation like systemd journal
| logs) into ClickHouse in a way that's useful for Telescope?
|
| What kind of indices do I have to configure so that queries are
| fast? Ideally with some examples.
|
| How can I make that full-text substring search queries are fast
| (e.g. "unexpected error 123")? When I filter with regex, is that
| still fast / use indices?
|
| From the docs it isn't quite clear to me how to configure the
| system so that I can just put a couple TB of logs into it and
| have queries be fast.
|
| Thanks!
| r0b3r4 wrote:
| Telescope is primarily focused on log visualization, not on log
| collection or preparing ClickHouse for storage. The system does
| not currently provide (and I think will not ever) built-in
| mechanisms for ingesting logs from any sources.
|
| I will consider providing a how-to guide on setting up log
| storage in ClickHouse, but I'm afraid I won't be able to cover
| all possible scenarios. This is a highly specific topic that
| depends on the infrastructure and needs of each organization.
|
| If you're looking for a all-in-one solution that can*both
| collect and visualize logs, you might want to check out
| https://www.highlight.io or https://signoz.io or other similar
| projects.
|
| And also, by the way, I'm not trying to create a "Grafana Loki
| killer" or a "killer" of any other tool. This is just an open
| source project - I simply want to build a great log viewer
| without worrying about how to attract users from Grafana Loki
| or Elastic or any other tool/product.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| As someone who has never worked anywhere that tried it out,
| what do you not like about loki. I've been stuck in the very
| expensive splunk and opensearch/kibana mines for many years and
| I find it an amazingly frustrating place to be. I honestly find
| that I can better debug via logs using grep than either of
| those tools.
| oulipo wrote:
| Very cool! Would be nice to have a library for the frontend
| components for the log viewer, to be able to reuse them in other
| projects :)
| r0b3r4 wrote:
| Nice idea! However, I'm not experienced enough with Vue (and
| frontend) development to properly design an exportable
| component. So, at least for now, I don't think I'll be able to
| make it happen myself.
| helsinki wrote:
| Just curious, as I'm in the market - why should I use this
| instead of the ELK stack?
| SkipperCat wrote:
| We've found that ClickHouse is extremely fast for write-
| once/read-many. So its great for recording logs. If Telescope
| provides the search/index features that Elastic provides, this
| could be a nice performance bump. FWIW, I haven't tested
| Telescope, so this is all just my musing.
| kbumsik wrote:
| It is not same as OP, but according to a similar o11y stack on
| top of Clickhouse, Signoz, Clickhouse based logging costs less
| than ELK for storage and performs better:
|
| https://github.com/SigNoz/logs-benchmark
| r0b3r4 wrote:
| Well, if you're happy with ELK, you should definitely use it!
| As I mentioned earlier, I'm not trying to sell anything or
| convince people to switch from their current solutions - just
| offering an alternative perspective on how things can be done.
|
| From my perspective, a ClickHouse-based setup can be cheaper
| and possibly faster in certain conditions - here's some
| comparison made by ClickHouse Inc. -
| https://clickhouse.com/blog/clickhouse_vs_elasticsearch_the_...
|
| My motto is "Know your data". I'm not a big fan of schemaless
| setups - I believe in designing a proper database schema rather
| than just pushing data into a black hole and hoping the system
| will handle it.
| smjburton wrote:
| Would this also work with something like Plausible
| (https://github.com/plausible/analytics) which uses ClickHouse to
| store web analytics data, or is it primarily for log data?
| r0b3r4 wrote:
| Despite the fact that Telescope is focused on application log
| data, it could be used for any type of data as long as it's
| stored in ClickHouse and has some time fields.
|
| At the moment, I have no plans to support arbitrary data
| visualization in Telescope, as I believe there are better BI-
| like tools for that scenario.
| smjburton wrote:
| Yeah that's fair, thank you.
| alrocar wrote:
| Awesome stuff! Just published something similar today
|
| Just curious, what is the most challenging thing in your opinion
| when building such log viewer?
| r0b3r4 wrote:
| That sounds great! Do you have a link? I'd love to check it
| out.
|
| For me, the most challenging parts are still ahead - live
| tailing and a plugin system to support different storage
| backends beyond just ClickHouse. Those will be interesting
| problems to solve! What was the biggest challenge for you?
| kbumsik wrote:
| How is it different from Signoz, a complete observability stack
| (including Logs) built on top of Clickhouse?
| r0b3r4 wrote:
| Telescope is focused purely on viewing logs for existing data.
| It doesn't enforce any specific ingestion setup or schema and
| doesn't support traces or session storage.
|
| You can think of it as just one part of a logging platform,
| where a full platform might consist of multiple components like
| a UI, ingestion engine, logging agent, and storage. In this
| setup, Telescope is only the UI.
| ericb wrote:
| Very cool! Just digging in. Does it works with the new JSON
| format clickhouse introduced recently?
|
| Also, what service did you use to make the video, if you don't
| mind my asking?
| r0b3r4 wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| I haven't tested the new JSON format in ClickHouse yet, but
| even if something doesn't work at the moment, fixing it should
| be trivial.
|
| As for the video service, it wasn't actually a service but
| rather a set of local tools:
|
| - Video capture/screenshots - macOS default tools
|
| - Screenshot editing - GIMP
|
| - Voice generation - https://elevenlabs.io/app/speech-
| synthesis/text-to-speech
|
| - Montage - DaVinci Resolve 19
| mikeshi42 wrote:
| This looks pretty cool, I love seeing more clickhouse-native
| logging platforms springing up! It's a surprisingly underrated
| platform to build on when I talk to other engineers.
|
| I'm one of those authors of an existing log viewer (hyperdx) and
| was curious if we were one of those platforms that didn't fit
| your needs? Always love learning what use cases inspire different
| approaches.
| charrondev wrote:
| On the naming front telescope is already use for a log viewer
| https://laravel.com/docs/11.x/telescope
|
| If I search telescope logs on google that's the top result for
| me.
| PeterZaitsev wrote:
| Looks cool!
|
| If you're looking for this kind of UI also check out Coroot
| https://github.com/coroot/coroot which has awesome UI for logs
| and OpenTelemetry traces and also stores data in Clickhouse
| azophy_2 wrote:
| Is there any comprehensive guide in building observability stack
| using otel, clickhouse, and grafana? I think this is a solid
| stack for logging & tracing, but I've been looking into it but
| haven't found any authoritative reference for this particular
| stack (unlike ELK & LGTM stack)
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